MATLAB® is a product of The MathWorks, Inc. of Natick, Mass., which provides engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and educators across a diverse range of industries with an environment for technical computing. MATLAB® is an intuitive high performance language and a technical computing application that provides mathematical and graphical tools for mathematical computation, data analysis, visualization and algorithm development. As a desktop application, MATLAB® typically runs on a single computer. However, there is a limit to the complexity and the size of a problem that a single computer can solve. For example, for a data intensive program utilizing a few 1000 by 1000 arrays, there might not be enough processing power on the single computer to manipulate these arrays, or the program might take days to complete execution. Furthermore, there might not be enough memory on a processor to store one or more of the arrays needed for a data intensive program.
With many engineering and scientific problems requiring larger and more complex modeling, many scientists and engineers are interested in using parallel computing to solve their problems. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a user-friendly technique to employ parallel computing in a technical computing environment.